“I want to use the visual language of the 1980s unions, and share the modern camaraderie of men.” Artist Corbin Shaw and Elgar Johnson on breaking the masculine stereotype with new exhibition.

Corbin Shaw’s character can only be summarised with a sense of cheeky curiosity - an artist having grown up in Sheffield, who spent a lot of his childhood studying and questioning the classic understanding of lad culture that was ever-present in his family, friends, and overall environment. His work since the beginning has always aimed to question the concept of masculinity in the most traditional of places - the football stadium or the pub - and open the floor towards conversations with the different generations, and the dogmas of traditional masculinity. “The scope of my work has always been me trying to figure out who I am and where that all comes from - what has been passed down to me by my father and his own understanding of what a man should act and talk like. By exploring this, I am always better able to reject what I don’t identify with and open the floor for these types of generational conversations.”

When Shaw met Elgar Johnson, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Circle Zero Eight, their shared mission of conversational creativity is what connected them closer, especially with Johnson’s continuous dedication towards bridging and highlighting the layered beauty of sports, and how they translate into an artistic space. “I’d been aware of Corbin for a long time, and when we first launched Circle Zero Eight, he represented a lot of what I aimed to do, which is bridge terrace culture with art, and find how both merge in the space.”

Collaborating together on their very first project, a two-day exhibition in the FLANNELS gallery space on Oxford Circus, the project titled For The Love Of The Lads, saw Shaw invite a group of Year 8 students from Aylesbury Grammar School to reflect and think about their personal associations with masculinity, and create something special in the process. As Shaw spoke to the students, they were encouraged to transform their personal connections into art, creating a series of flags that ushered the overwhelming openness and curiosity of a new generation, one that leads with kindness, painting together phrases like “Being Brave Is Being Your True Self’ and ‘Red And White Make Pink’.

Speaking to Perfect, both Elgar and Corbin reflected back on how they began approaching their creativity together, and what contemporary masculinity is really about.

Angel: Corbin and Elgar, tell me a bit more about the beginning of this project. How did you first meet and decide to collaborate together?

Elgar Johnson: I have been aware of Corbin's work for a long time, so when we first started the magazine, he was actually someone we spoke about quite early on because obviously, I have always been a massive football fan. I liked the way that he blurred terrace culture with art, and that was what I wanted to do with my ideas for Circle Zero Eight in the first place. His team reached out to us one day, and we were really excited to create something together.

This idea of involving younger generations came from Corbin, he had the concept of working with the school, and we absolutely loved it. I actually had someone stop me on the Tube two years ago that followed me and my work, and we had a conversation about interesting London artists and creatives, and actually showed me Corbin’s work, and with this project that very person recently messaged me again saying “I knew you would collaborate together!”, so it was a very interesting turn of events!

Corbin Shaw: We got in touch through both of our collectives, and we were just talking about what I was working on, and the projects I wanted to do. At the same time, Rachel, an art teacher from Aylesbury Grammar School reached out to me as she wanted to create a project on masculinity, and create something larger on the topic.She was chatting to the boys about their ideas of masculinity and where they came from, and making them understand the many rumours surrounding the topic. She decided to show them a lot of art around that subject, and my work came up, so she got in contact with us to explore the idea of me coming to do a talk.

She invited us to the school, and I spoke in front of the whole of Year 8, which was so daunting, because I was thinking about what I was like when I was their age, and I was just a bit of nightmare. As I spoke to them, I wanted to present the different sort of male role models that I'd looked up to, and tried to basically reframe the ideas of what we have around strength. Is it strong to be vulnerable, how do you talk about injustice in groups of boys, where you have a disagreement with something that's been said. My main aim is to bring out love and tenderness in these boys when they felt like they couldn't have a space to do that.

After I spoke to them, we created a flag making workshop, where I explained to them what I'd written on my flags and banners, and how my art was based on my personal confessions or reminding myself to do something. I also spoke about the first flag that I made, which was We Should Talk About Our Feelings, in response to a man that was my dad's best friend growing up, who took his own life, and then all the men in his area had made a flag in honour of him.

Once I started speaking, and told them my story, they like really went for it and just started immediately writing things that came to their head about what they're scared of. There was this incredible moment where one of the boys wrote down ‘Ballet is For Men’, and it turns out that boy's dad plays one of the portrayals of Billy Elliot in the film, and once he wrote that, he told us his story and how he has never spoken out about that before. It was such an incredible moment, working with them and that they felt so comfortable to start telling us these things out loud. My idea was to use a visual language of miners and unions, and the sort of camaraderie that was built amongst men in the 1970s and 1980s. You can almost draw a parallel with what's happening in Britain at the moment with the striking workers, and how that has brought society a lot closer together. I want to use that to bring all these boys together, and say ‘Look, we're all the same’.

Angel: When you both think about masculinity and your own experience with it, what has this project taught you about your own identity?

Elgar Johnson: Even though Corbin and myself are a different age, we come from a similar world of being surrounded by very masculine people. My dad was a heavy haulage driver and he had his own company, so we were around a lot of truckers all the time. With my work, I've always tried to blur the lines in terms of exploring what I think men find attractive about each other, not sexually in particular, but more that I find men's opinion of men really fascinating. With everything that I've tried to do, and what I'm still trying to do, I always aim to educate. If there was someone around doing what Corbin is doing now when I was younger, I think it would have been an absolute revelation, because there wasn't anyone like him to relate to. You had to make your own way, finding through your own path.

Corbin Shaw: When I was at university, I realized that my whole life that I've been obsessed with looking at men, and I've always idolised my father figure like so many people in my life. My room back home was covered with magazines of pop stars or footballers, and when I was at university, I wrote this piece that was like about how much the scene from Saturday Night Fever, where John Travolta is getting ready, has impacted my way of thinking. I saw it as a way of piecing together his identity through the American Italian film stars.

I think men probably wouldn't like to admit the fact that they are staring at each other so intently, in the sense of heterosexual men dressing for other men a lot of the time. I recently watched this amazing documentary about the so called ‘football hooligans’ and their perspective, and one of the guys expressed ‘Well, if I'm gonna get in a fight on the weekend, you best believe that I'm going to go out and buy a new jacket, so the other man can look at me and go, “Well, fuck you”’.

Men love to subtly express themselves through objects and perception - the things they buy, what they drink, how they sound, and where they go. Specifically with my father, I’ve had a push and pull relationship with him taking me to hyper masculine environments growing up with very rigid understandings, whilst moving to London and being at an art school, it made me reflect so much more on who I was.

Angel: With this project out into the open, what does the future hold for you both? How do you see this project evolving?

Corbin Shaw: It has really opened my eyes to the possibility of working on a public scale, and spreading a mass message and joy. As an artist, you tend to create autobiographical work and you are vulnerable to sharing it, which then becomes a collective, because people elate to it and see themselves in it, having the same feeling you felt when creating.

Oftentimes, you feel like you're moving forward into a more open and fluid idea of masculinity and gender roles, but then you witness the stories in the general media that these young boys re exposed to, and you can’t help but feel upset at how polarised the world has become with violence. I think as an artist, or anyone with a platform, I have a responsibility to do something. And I think doing this project, I've realised that I need to do more of it, and share more of it.

Elgar Johnson: We love Corbin and, would love to collaborate on more projects. We're always going to support whatever he does, because he fits into the Circle Zero Eight world so perfectly, and we just love what he does We are really excited about expanding people's knowledge of what sport can be, and how that incorporates into art. An important message for us is to continue making sure people become more open-minded when they think of sport, and they see how the environment has progressed, and also what sport can bring further.